"He was a super talent and a lovely kid," says Sky Sports F1 commentator after Bianchi passes away aged 25
Saturday 18 July 2015 14:30, UK
Martin Brundle believes Jules Bianchi was destined to be an F1 race winner before his life was cut short by his tragic accident at Suzuka last October.
Bianchi’s family announced early on Saturday morning that their son had passed away in hospital in Nice nine months after suffering severe head injuries at the Japanese GP.
Although driving for one of the grid’s smallest teams, Bianchi had established himself as one of the sport’s rising stars in his 34 Grands Prix and claimed what remain Marussia/Manor's only points in F1 at last season’s Monaco GP.
The 25-year-old had been a Ferrari test driver since 2010 and had impressed for the historic Italian team when testing for them at Silverstone last July.
Sky Sports F1 commentator Brundle has paid a heartfelt tribute to Bianchi and is certain the Frenchman would have ended up in a race-winning car.
“He was a super talent and a lovely kid. He was a very warm personality and he had a great future ahead of him in Formula 1,” Brundle told Sky Sports News HQ.
“His life was cut way too short and it’s just very sad and seems such a waste of his talent. The potential was enormous. There isn’t any doubt he would have ended up in a front-running car – probably at Ferrari – and race victories I would say were certain.
“World championships? Who knows, that’s a tough one, but there’s no doubt where he was heading in terms of his ultimate potential in a racing car.
“It was just a matter of time really and there was a chance he could even have been in a Ferrari earlier, but that didn’t quite materialise.”
Tributes to Bianchi have poured in from across the motorsport spectrum and Brundle believes it is particularly symbolic of the Frenchman’s genial personality that the drivers who he raced against on the road to F1, such as Daniel Ricciardo and Valtteri Bottas, were so fond of him too.
“He was very open and a very likeable lad. He was just a born racer. He loved his racing and lived to race,” Brundle added.
“Of course, he had the family history, and some family tragedy too, in the racing world. We know the dangers – when you step over the side of a single-seater racing car you know there are risks. You can’t pretend otherwise, you just have to manage those risks down.
“He would have been well aware of that too. The cars have become much safer, the tracks have become much safer. But that risk was always there.
“It’s interesting to me that his former team-mates and his rivals in the junior categories all had a very special feeling towards him and had a great rapport with him, which tells you an awful lot. He didn’t make enemies on his way through - he won on talent alone.”
Sky F1’s Ted Kravitz agrees that Bianchi, the founding member of Ferrari’s Driver Academy, would eventually have raced for F1’s most famous team.
“He had such a bright future ahead of him in Formula 1. He was a Ferrari protégé and it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch of the imagination to say that he would have been driving for the great Scuderia Ferrari sometime in the future. But of course, that never happened,” Kravitz said.
“It’s a cliché to say ‘when people leave us they leave us too young’, but I think in Jules’s case that is only too true.”
